Traditional recruitment is in crisis, with many turning to talent acquisition instead. But if talent acquisition is to be more than another corporate buzzword, it’s essential to properly understand the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition.

We’re all familiar with the approach to recruitment in which candidates are sourced, scrutinized, and then passed off to hiring managers. The role of the recruiter usually stops there, and fails to take into consideration what comes next. To a large extent, this explains why the old models of recruitment now offer diminishing returns.

Over two-thirds of HR leaders say that employee onboarding is underutilized in their companies, which can seriously undermine staff retention. Poor management makes employees more likely to quit, and employees who feel under-appreciated are twice as likely to look for employment elsewhere. 

These lapses in workplace judgement, could very well be to blame for phenomena like workplace ghosting, where employees simply fail to turn up at all. Such developments point to a breakdown in the way that employer-employee relations begin, develop, and are handled over time.

What’s the solution? Talk of a new concept called talent acquisition has started to echo through corporate boardrooms worldwide. 

But what exactly is talent acquisition and how is it different from recruitment?

To understand this, we should first refresh our knowledge on what traditional recruitment involves. 

What Is Recruitment?

Recruitment is the process of searching for, evaluating and hiring experienced and qualified people to fill an existing vacancy at a company or organization. It usually follows a specific, pre-defined recruitment process that is highly standardized and typically implemented in periods of expansion or due to staff turnover.

Lots of factors influence the specific rhythms and cycles of recruitment in various workplaces. Staff turnover figures from 2017 show that the events and publishing sector had the highest rates of turnover, while general management and admin had the lowest.

Recruitment is an absolute fundamental of running any business, but it is essentially a short-term process that seeks to fill a company’s immediate needs. So how is talent acquisition different?

What Is Talent Acquisition?

Talent acquisition is similar to recruitment in the sense that it shares the same aim of finding the best people to work for your company. But whereas recruitment tends to be a very standardized, reactive process, talent acquisition is all about the long game of your company. It involves a more flexible and dynamic approach from your recruitment team and a broad understanding of the long-term strategic aims of your business.

What Is the Difference Between the Two?

Recruitment is an action… a tactical process to solve an immediate problem. Talent acquisition is a strategy, an ongoing process of making your company the most attractive place for quality talent, while ensuring you make use of the many avenues through which new talent can be sourced. 

Here are some key ways talent acquisition seeks to expand your recruitment horizons…

Networking: You have to be connected in your industry; attend relevant industry events and networking sessions, build diverse social networks online.

Referrals: Nearly half of businesses report that the most quality hires come from referrals from existing employees, so make sure you have an attractive employee referral program in place.

Career sites and job boards: An oldie, but a goodie. They’re still important to use so take the time to research the best jobs boards for your sector. 

Social media: Ignoring social media and its recruitment potential will lead to your peril.  LinkedIn is still the biggest online recruiting tool after your company website. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are also important. 

Brand marketing. Talent acquisition means you need to make your company the most attractive place for talent to work. Enhancing your brand imaging can help your company secure its reputation as the hot place for talent to be. 

Is Talent Acquisition More Important Than Recruitment?

There are cases where  a traditional recruitment strategy may work for you ,but data has shown that a majority of recruiters struggle to get the best people to fill their vacancies. In the UK, 90% of employers are struggling to fill roles.

Talent acquisition goes far beyond the mere tactical approach of recruitment. Similar to the process of learning how to be a good manager, learning how to implement a talent acquisition strategy is about coming to understand the true value of your employees. 

When you hire, you’re investing in people, but all too often it can be seen as just another costly expense. This can encourage employers to cut corners and see recruitment as a mechanical process that never changes.

Talent acquisition is about being aware of current staffing trends, the state of the workforce, and using that insight to attract vital talent.

For example, research has shown that over half of Americans are quitting their current jobs right now. A talent acquisition strategy would prevent this by anticipating and identifying the reasons employees might be tempted to leave your company, and addressing those issues so that the recruitment team isn’t hiring due to a lack of awareness in foresight in your organization.

Furthermore, most business owners don’t know why their employees leave. The majority of them think that it’s all about money, but it’s not. In fact, only 12% of employees leave because of the money. 

One problem is that employers don’t conduct exit interviews to find out the real reasons why people quit. An effective talent acquisition strategy—one that views the candidate/employee experience holistically—would do so, and pose the following questions in an exit interview.  

• How could we have made your time with our company better?
• What measures can we put into place to keep current and future employees happy?

Your relationship to candidates and potential employees doesn’t end once they sign their contract. As with every relationship, its success is predicated upon empathy, understanding, and an ability to learn from one’s mistakes.

Employers who implement a talent acquisition strategy realize that recruitment is not just about scrutinizing candidates to see if they’re right for your company, it’s also about convincing potential talent that you are the right company to meet their career expectations.

Jerome Ternynck and Tracey Allison join Lorne Epstein on his eponymous podcast for a frank discussion on the challenges of today’s talent economy.

“The war for talent is over and the candidates have won,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, as he sits down with Tracey Allison, Director of Global Talent at Avery Dennison, on the latest episode of the Lorne Epstein “How To Capture Talent In Today’s Candidate-driven Market”, recorded at Unleash Amsterdam 2018. Far from taken aback, Lorne and Tracey laugh in agreement.

“[Recruitment] today is about how you attract talent to your organization,” says Tracey. “You are marketing candidates and bringing talent in, rather than, ‘I have a job – who wants to apply?”

During the next hour, the three experts discuss the needs of today’s talent practitioners from both a strategic and technological perspective, with stories of personal challenges they’ve faced in the field, from diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives to getting a seat at the table. Listen now for the full scoop and check out the top 5 takeaways below.

1. HR technology is a must.

“Why does everyone have great tech except recruiters?” Jerome asks.”Sales, Accounting, and Marketing software are all par for the course, yet people balk at allocating budget for Recruiting systems. Recruiting is a digital function now, and they need the right tools to be successful.”

2.Don’t force candidates to fit your mold.

“It’s about engaging the right way,” says Tracey. “We need to stop ticking boxes and go after talent. Right now, we should be driven more by the individual candidate and how they can be successful – which will really be your department’s ROI – versus just filling a job.”

3. Engage hiring managers, they are your friends.

“The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers is, in many ways, a broken one,” says Jerome. “It doesn’t get supported through technology, which should be the enabler. At the end of the day, hiring managers and recruiters both want to find great people. If you put them together in one place where they can actually work together then suddenly you don’t have the dynamic where hiring managers are the customers and recruiters are the service center. Instead, it’s a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership where recruiters feed the pipe and hiring managers close the deal.”

4. Sell a lifestyle.

“In a candidate-driven marketplace, getting the message of what life is actually like at a particular organization is extremely important,” says Tracey. “More and more, the lines between work and life are blurred, and it’s all about the experience.”

5. D&I every step of the way.

“First, you have to go the extra mile to source candidates from underrepresented groups,” says Jerome.  “And it’s not good enough to do a regular sourcing effort, and then say ‘oh well, only white guys applied, not our fault’. You have to actively go and source people that are underrepresented. Diversity is critical to business success in every organization. Second, you gotta make sure that once you have that diverse talent coming in, that they’re not being discriminated against. Which, in recruiting, means having some objective criteria to rate these candidates throughout the interview process.”

Learn more about creating an interview process that discourages bias in the full episode, alongside other awesome learnings including examples from Tracey on how TA can be a strategic partner for business success.

This is a contribution from Tomáš Haviar, a Recruiter at Bynder Orbit – a creative content management software provider.

In many organizations, recruitment is reactive. Businesses only start seeking people once a glaring hole in the company becomes apparent instead of preemptively seeking people as part of a business strategy.

Yet, people are key to reach any business goal. Take the following three objectives for example.

• Build a new workout app.
• Market footwear to the right audience
• Put on a world-class event to showcase your new SaaS platform.

The necessary ingredient to accomplish any of these objectives is people – people with the right skills and at the right time.

Your business strategy could fall apart if you don’t have the right team which means recruitment can’t be an afterthought. 

Recruiters know that finding the right talent isn’t as easy as just posting a job advertisement so here’s what you need to know to turn your hiring process into a proactive system that grows your business.

Make recruiters your partners in strategy.

Involving recruitment in your key business strategy decisions is beneficial for creating realistic budget and time expectations.

Recruiters can help you figure out whether the people you need to make your business strategy a reality are available in the recruitment market at the moment. If they are not, then recruitment can also advise on how long it might take to recruit those people, and therefore how long it will take to put your business strategy into practice.

Let’s say your tech company wants to create an app, then you will need IOS and Android developers. If there is a shortage of IOS developers and Android developers in the market at the moment, then you will have to set longer and more realistic deadlines for the creation of the app.

Your recruiter can also let you know how much finding and hiring these developers will cost and if they are out of your price range you can reconsider how vital the project is to your overall business strategy.

An additional advantage of including a representative from your recruitment team in your business strategy meetings is that the recruiter can gauge the direction in which the organization is moving, and can start the recruitment process with the future of the company in mind. This means that when the organization does firmly decide on a business strategy, the necessary recruitment process is already underway.

What exactly can recruiters do with this extra lead-time?

Recruiting for in-demand positions takes time. It’s not just a case of writing a job description for your career site. The best talent is usually passive. So it’s important to nurture your desired candidates and slowly build up their interest in your company. That way, once you are ready to hire, you have a full pipeline of interested candidates.

There are a number of ways to begin nurturing your ideal candidates:

• Look for the kind of events your ideal candidates go to and go along to them. This is where recruiters can meet their ideal candidates in a less formal setting.
• Before you start talking about interviews or job offers, invite ideal candidates to the office for a coffee or beer, just to show them what the company and its culture are like.
• You can also promote your company and its culture through website content. This could be as simple as a blog post on the company blog on ‘6 reasons why working for Bynder will change your life’.

These are long term strategies with high rewards. The sooner the recruiter can be brought into the business strategy, the sooner these techniques can be put into practice and the rewards reaped.

The slogan of my community, AristocracyHR,  is, “HR Otherwise Would Be Uncivilized.”  That is to say that practices that are anything other than smart, common sense, innovative, and humane in application would be uncivilized and therefore lacking the value that an effective HR function should provide.

Anyone who is hired at a company is usually brought in through the recruitment group or the group eloquently called Talent Acquisition. Talent Acquisition from my perspective is the alpha and omega of HR and the entire organization. Any misstep by them and it is a grave reflection on the rest of the bunch.

The interesting thing is Talent Acquisition is only as good as the resources put into the function by decision makers. If poor practices are handed down from the top; it will be passed on to jobseekers and later to new hires. We can get into the conversation about who should nudge who when it comes to shaping the organization so that it exudes culture and value at a later date. However, there are a few things that have occurred to me in my travels around HR; some best practices that that can make every company’s hiring strategy civilized.

Here are five tips for deploying a successful hiring strategy in 2013:

1)     Pay particular attention to the “human” aspect of human resources and make sure that every process, policy, practice, initiative, and experience takes on a “human” perspective. All too often, organizations get wrapped up in a law, a piece of compliance, policy, and let’s not forget their bottom-line. I’m not saying look at every situation with rose colored glasses. I’m simply saying to stop and think about how this new initiative or way of doing things will affect the human that will ultimately live through it. Heck, ask an employee or two before you roll out one of your masterful plans- you may be surprised at their answer.

2)     Embrace technology, but do not overcomplicate it. Whether it is your applicant tracking system or your new employee self service rollout. By all means spring into the 21^st century, but be mindful that everyone is pressed for time and attention span. Make anything you do with your technology for hiring is intuitive and simple. It should not require a 2,000 page manual and a Computer Science degree.

3)     Stop wasting jobseekers time. Yes, I said it. Stop showing up to job fairs with no jobs or jobs no one there could qualify for. If no one out there is good enough to do your job openings, pull the posting and wait for the backlash of the employees that are now overburdened with the extra work. My point is stop the cheap tricks. People talk and they aren’t as dumb as you think. Actually they aren’t dumb at all. They can see the trick coming before you say, Ta-da! This right here will kill your brand and any chances you have of attracting top talent.

4)     Put the dollars and cents behind the strategy. The companies whose hiring strategies have impact are the ones who are putting dollars and cents behind the strategy. That doesn’t mean be foolish in spending your money – it simply means money well spent within the hiring function can do wonders for your recruitment and employer branding efforts. Like most budgets, there is almost always an area where money is wasted either on a worthless initiative or just because the money has to be spent before the end of your fiscal year. Putting money behind the strategy can be as simple as springing for a continental breakfast at a local venue for new hire orientation or advertising the opening on a new niche website. It sure beats the humdrum, transactional orientation you hold in a conference room where the highlight of the new hire’s day is signing up for benefits and boring presentations.

5)     Check in with your employees (whether new or tenured) before they check out. People get hired, they get an offer letter, they arrive for orientation, they report to their departments and then they disappear into the deep, dark crevices of the organization. Things for that new employee usually goes well and they thrive. Yet other times they ask themselves one month into the job, what the heck am I doing here? It is an internal conversation that gets more infuriating with time, because no one has the courtesy to do a customer satisfaction check in. Without periodic interviews, an exit interview of tenured employee simply doesn’t tell the whole story. Do spot checks even if things look good from where you sit. You don’t want any Op-Ed’s floating around the internet airing out your dirty laundry or better yet you actually want to retain your employees.

Deploying a hiring strategy for 2013 without taking these five tips into consideration would truly make for uncivilized hiring and poor outcomes. If you can incorporate 50% of these suggestions, you will see a remarkable change in your employees and how job seekers see you. It’s all about making  many small strides for big results. Baby steps people, baby steps.

Janine N. Truitt (@CzarinaofHR) is an HR Professional based in Long Island, NY. Learn more of her expertise in Recruitment, HR Technology, Talent Management, Employee Relations, and HR Policy/Compliance on her blog, The Aristocracy of HR.